How Many Lies Can Obama Tell About Keating Economics

Cross posted from McCain Victory 08.

So I got an e-mail Monday morning [excerpts below] from Obama Campaign puppet master David Plouffe announcing that they would be releasing a 13 minute “documentary”, “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis.” I was curious how many lies of commission and omission the Obama campaign could fit into a single short e-mail.

Now I didn’t expect Plouffe to mention that Barack Obama has received in three years, five times the political donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that John McCain has received in twenty years. I didn’t expect Plouffe to explain what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought with those payments.

Over the weekend, John McCain's top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and "turn the page" to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

Okay. According to RealClearPolitics it wasn’t McCain’s top adviser and what he said was "looking to turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's liberal, aggressively liberal, record and how he will be too risky for the Americans." I guess talking about Senator Obama’s record is a personal attack. I mean he did personally establish his record as a hard left liberal.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

Well that is demonstrably false as we are not “in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” While we are at risk of it, the worst economic crisis since the great depression is still the stagflation brought on by the Carter economic policies when home foreclosure rates were higher than they are today.

Actually John McCain supported greater oversight and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both in 2003 and 2006. John McCain had the foresight to predict the crisis that led to the Government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama’s buddy, Senator Chris Dodd wouldn’t even let the bill out of committee.

But it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

Actually over regulation and misguided regulation caused this crisis.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings.

Actually John McCain was never at the “center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan”.
The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990 and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett [a Democrat] recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett's recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican.

I also find it interesting how Plouffe tries to spin the phrase “investors lost their savings” implying that people with savings accounts lost money (They didn’t as they were FSLIC insured.) and unless Mr. Plouffe knows all the investors personally, I am not sure he can also imply that they lost all of their savings.

Plouffe also doesn’t mention that the policies of Obama, helping to block stricter oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has already cost the government billions of dollars and investors have lost over $60 billion of their savings in the last year alone with the collapse of FNMA common and preferred stock.

Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to
bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating,
played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee.

This from wikipedia on the Keating Five Scandal

After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings, with Cranston receiving a formal reprimand. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised "poor judgment".

[Plouffe fails to mention that it was only Democratic Senators who were found to have acted improperly and in fact all three chose to not run for re-election.]

And this time, McCain's bankrupt economic philosophy has put our economy at the brink of collapse and put millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

Actually again, no. It was the policies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Barack Obama that have put millions of American’s at risk of losing their homes. Of course, most of those people couldn’t really afford those homes in the first place.

If Barack Obama through David Plouffe can tell that many lies about John McCain in a short e-mail, I wonder how many he can tell in a 13 minute documentary.

But of course neither Plouffe or Obama will tell you that.